I noticed my use of "indiscriminately" was problematic and I edited my previous post to remove it before I saw your reply. I'd hoped I could fix the ambivalence

I noticed my use of "indiscriminately" was problematic and I edited my previous post to remove it before I saw your reply. I'd hoped I could fix the ambivalence quickly, before someone misunderstood. I was too late; my apologies. What I meant to say: indiscriminately murdering people after an ideological lithmus test. Or for their beliefs. For their ethnicity. Stuff like that. You know, not entirely unlike what the Nazis did. > The ends matter. The means do not. We disagree here; but even if we take this to be correct, you are wrong about what the ends are. "No nazis around" is in itself only a means, and not an end. The end is what we want to accomplish by "purging the nazis", or what we do end up accomplishing instead. Their abhorrent ideology does not merely exist in an ideological space. It is abhorrent precisely because of the consequences it leads to: the rule of violence, the establishment of a system for wholesale "purging" of whole groups of people (and lots of other bad things, but we're discussing these ones). That is what we want to avoid. You may think that you can simply "kill all the Nazis and feed them to the pigs" to avoid this. Even if you think that's a reasonable course of action, have you thought about how this would work? In order to accomplish it, you will have to put into place a system that catches all potential Nazis, precisely determines their ideology - judge people not by their actual actions, but what is believed are their thoughts, some of which are now a capital crime. Which are the ones, by the way? Where is the line? Who is going to decide this correctly? Even if you can, or are willing to accept some false positives (your "no benefit of doubt"): you will then have to kill all these people and feed them to the pigs. Such an effort is going to require state power and some serious organisation, and likely more than one "pig farm", let's call it that. Does this remind you of aything in history? There's plenty to choose from, humanity seems quite adept at pulling off such things, whenever instability propels a group to power that hates another group very much. But I believe the prime example, that comes closest to what you envision, happened in Europe in the last century. For the admittedly noble goal of countering nazis and their destructive doings, you're willing to slaughter, and keep slaughtering, permit me this summary word for "kill and feed to the pigs", everyone who is deemed to be a Nazi. In such a situation, if I were you, I'd avoid things that might get me mistaken for one. You don't want to become a Robespierre! Take a good look at yourself and what you are endorsing, where you're invariably going to end up. The ends do matter.